"De cuya persecusión doy cuenta a vuestra excelencia": constructions with cuyo in archival documents from the end of the 18th and 19th centuries in the spanish of Uruguay

Abstract

This paper describes some syntactic-semantic characteristics and the diachronic variation of constructions with cuyo, present in archival documents from the late 18th and 19th centuries in Uruguayan Spanish, extracted from CORDIAM. The analysis presents constructions that differentiate possessive and non-possessive uses, in which cuyo establishes relations with or without syntactic dependence with the preceding segment, always maintaining its deictic value, with values closer to demonstratives in some cases. Over time, there is a lower frequency of use and less syntactic variation: the canonical use (a relative possessive determiner in a noun phrase) gains ground at the expense of non‑canonical constructions, some of which even disappear.